'3eanuts': Charlie Brown and Snoopy live in sad, chaotic world without meaning, turns out

From the same pit of comic-deleting existential misery that brought you Garfield Minus Garfield, the Internet has now coughed up 3eanuts, which has a simple gimmick: Removing the fourth panel from Charles M. Schulz’s daily Peanuts strips. Sound random? It’s not: Schulz typically used the final panel to end on a redemptive note — sometimes wistful, sometimes sarcastic — but it always lessened the sad gravity of the first three panels. Without that redemptive conclusion, we bear witness to the true existential horrors facing the cast of Peanuts. The future is relentlessly grim. Lucy is utterly cruel. Linus is apparently some sort of animal-hating fascist. In general, Charlie Brown lives in a world of relentless sadness and debilitation. 3eanuts is a great monument to Schultz’s delicate balancing act — he somehow made the subject matter of an Ingmar Bergman movie seem really funny for 50 years. 3eanuts will also just make you laugh, if you’re cynical, and you probably grew up reading Peanuts, so you have to be at least a little cynical. Good ol’ Charlie Brown… how we hate him! (Via AV Club)